Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman and designer Yves Behar spoke today at the Innovation by Design conference here in New York, and had a couple of interesting things to say about fashion, design, and user interface. A post on FastCompanyDesign (whose conference it is) quote Rahman as saying that fashion and technology design conflict because people use fashion to set themselves … [Read more...]
Xerox Flexibles and Microduinos
It's intuitively obvious that wearables will require flexible circuits; The human body, after all, moves and consists of curves; boxes are not fashionable. Xerox is positioning itself as an expert in all things printing, and has gotten itself interested in the printing of electronic circuitry on flexible substrate. Another strategy might be to make the rigid circuitry very … [Read more...]
8 Interesting Wearables Ideas
There's a thought-provoking list of eight concepts for wearable tech on the AITechTrends tumblr. We're not wild about all of them -- a couple of them seem to reinforce the idea that Girls Think Tech Is Icky -- but a couple are neat. One idea, unsurprisingly out of China, is for a pollution mask that also gathers data and sends it to a crowd-sourced map. Kind of like Waze for … [Read more...]
Eyes on the Road, Please
Nissan, the automaker, is talking about a smartwatch that it says will connect with your performance (Nissan) car and your smartphone. If the video is to be believed, they expect that the watch will do things like track your speed and your heartrate, and will send you exhortations and allow you to connect to Twitter. While, presumably, you're driving. Oh: and the thing … [Read more...]
Survey: Women don’t wear watches, own too many shoes
Comes now an upscale shopping-mall survey sponsored by the BlogHer blog network. Along with a bunch of stuff that we don't care about (professionally, that is) here, there are a couple of salient points for the Wearables crowd: More than 40 percent of women said they would wear a fitness tracker. Nearly three-quarters of women rely on their cell phones to tell time; no … [Read more...]
Clothes that change color
How about a line of clothing that has LEDs built between layers of fabric, all of it controllable from an app or responding to things like ambient temperature, your mood as indicated by your Twitter feed or the beats of music at a club? New Scientist reports that just such clothes were shown last week at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers in Zurich. The line, … [Read more...]
Consumers are either not ready or eager for wearables, depending who you ask
Depending on which press release you read, consumers are either" "not ready" for wearables, or wearables will be mainstream in the next couple of years. A seven-nation survey of 3,600 people performed by SSI found that one out of every three people were "very" or "somewhat" likely to buy a wearable, with 65 percent interested in a wristband and 55 in glasses, a company … [Read more...]
Some Glass owners allowed to invite three BFFs to join them
Own a Google Glass? Tired of of being the only one in your crowd who looks like a dork? FastCompany reports that some Glass owners are being allowed to invite as many as three friends to buy a set. If you're still not among the select and you have $1,500 burning a hole in your pocket, remember that Glass is expected to go on sale to the public by the end of this year. Even … [Read more...]
A Belt That Gives Directions
Nothing can make you feel (or look) like a tourist -- or a target -- quite so much as looking down at your phone while you navigate through an unfamiliar city or neighborhood. An Indigogo project called Triposo is a belt that connects to your phone and map app, and buzzes when you need to make a turn. Different parts of the belt vibrate to tell you whether to turn left or … [Read more...]
Smart Watches Old News to Casio
The idea of wristwatch communication is at least as old as, well, Chester Gould and Dick Tracy. Apple may have taken all the air out of the market with hardly a word and without a product, but the NYTimes points out that until now it's been the more-or-less-anonymous Casio that's done most of the grunt work in connected watches. I remember a Timex Datalink watch from 20 … [Read more...]